We were up reasonably early again this morning so that we could walk the 35 minutes over to Tarbet for our ferry trip on Loch Lomond. Peter had found a boat company that take you on a little scenic trip around the loch and then drop you at a ‘town’ called Inversnaid. It was another cool and foggy morning, but this made for quite a nice walk up the road, and there was a lovely breeze as the ferry set off. The boat driver told us that Loch Lomond is the UK’s largest freshwater body of water, which was a surprise to me, and gave us a bunch of other facts about the Loch before dropping us by Inversnaid Hotel. This was about all the town had, historically being a stopping point for ferries and stagecoaches between the Lochs, as well as a stopping point for walkers doing the West Highland Way. 

Annoyingly, just as we were settling into walking up the hill towards a trail I’d read about, we got an email from our landlady saying our notice was ‘invalid’, with no clear explanation for why. We can infer that she wants us to pay the full August rent, which we don’t have to do according to our tenancy agreement, but we’ll have to spend some time working that out, and it was certainly weighing heavily on our minds throughout the day.

Nevertheless, we continued our walk and passed some lovely scenery on the way up towards Loch Arklet. We had intended to walk a trail a bit further, but there were horseflies absolutely taking chunks out of us so we ended up turning back and doing a trail through an oak forest down to the waterfalls instead. Luckily this was a beautiful substitute, and we had views over multiple waterfalls and over the Loch. We then continued past the hotel again, and northwards up part of the West Highland Way. Loch Lomond is supposed to have beautiful wild swimming so we found a nice spot tucked under the trail to get changed, and then tottered our way across the rocky beach into the water. It was certainly chilly, but not as cold as I’d expected. After a bit of a paddle and a sit in the water, relieved to get away from the flies, we got dried off and headed back to the hotel. 

The weather was finally clearing up, and we found a great table in the sunshine to sit and watch the views. We’d originally intended to catch the 4:30 ferry back but it was 2 and we didn’t really want to do any more big walks and there wasn’t much else there, so we ended up catching the 2:15 ferry back to Tarbet. In Tarbet, we sat on the grass hill above the pier and read in the sun and relaxed for a while. We had a dinner booking for 5:30 so after a bit of a walk through town, which was very underwhelming, we made our way to the Slanj. The restaurant was located in a converted church and was absolutely gorgeous! It was ‘modern Scottish’ so we had haggis Bon Bons, Peter had salmon risotto and I had fish and chips, and of course we finished with fried Mars bar bites. It was a fun way to finish the day and afterwards we just wandered back down the road to Arrochar.